Gravatars

One of the most obvious changes is that you might have noticed some peoples pictures next to their comments. OK, well just Aubrey for now, but she seems to be the only one reading commenting on our blog since she currently hold 4 out of the last 5 comments. That little picture is a Gravatar. It isn’t coming from our site. You have to go sign up for one for your email address and then our site uses your email to go fetch your picture. You can go and change your pictures as much as you want. If you don’t have one setup for your email account, then instead of showing a goofy default image, I hacked it a bit to not display an image. But it is still my site and I reserve the right to replace your gravatar (or add one) with a picture I deem more appropriate.

Threaded Comments

When leaving a comment you can now “reply” to a previous comment and your comment will be indented below the comment you were replying too. This probably isn’t that cool to all of y’all because we don’t actually get that many comments, but it once in a while, especially when Tim comments, people often have reply comments.

Tags

You’ve probably seen “tagging” in other applications such as photo organizing software. Folders make sense for physical things like a photograph. It can only be in one physical folder at a time. But with electronic documents tagging makes way more sense. If you are organizing your digital photos or email (don’t even get me started on my email rant. that is a whole different post) in folders you are wasting your time. You are always going to have items that belong in two folders, but can only go in one. With tags you can simply add multiple tags to it and you can sort on any of them. We’re still keeping the categories around for course grain organization, but we’ll also be tagging posts. It also meant I got to add the cool tag cloud widget which animates the tags as if they were on a 3D sphere. Go ahead and move your mouse over it and see it react.

WordPress Features

The update made the internal software that we use to “run” the blog is a huge improvement. It went from something that took someone who knows about web hosting, php, and html programming to something that any average person could use and maintain. Updating in the past was tedious. Now you just click a button and it all happens automagically. It is all AJAXy and you can just drag things around to easy change the layout of the site. Overall, very nice. I haven’t used Blogger or other hosted blog services, but I can’t imagine they are better or easier to use. And that is saying something considering that WordPress is free and open source.

Text Widget

OK, so this is an internal feature too, but I thought other wordpress users should know about it because initially I didn’t realize how cool it was. To design the sidebar, you add widgets. There are some widgets that come with WordPress and other users can create more. But what if you want to add something that there isn’t a widget for? That is what the Text Widget is for. All you have to do is past in some HTML code into it and BAM, there it is on your sidebar. So when you want to add your Google Reader Shared items and not have it look all ghetto using some RSS plugin which kinda works. Just copy the javascript that Google gives you and paste it in the text widget. No more hacking up your theme which makes updating your theme a pain.

K2 Makes WordPress Better

OK, so this is just a plug for my theme which rocks. I’m not doing it justice with the lame header image. Yes, Jenny I am going to put something cool up but first you asked me to help with Violet’s announcement remember and plus I’m busy with all this blog stuff. But K2 is actually more than a theme as it is a mod to wordpress. For example it provides a better widget manager with more options.

Mystery Feature

OK, so it isn’t a mystery but more of a “what is that?”, although Jenny had a hard time finding it. I figured I’d try it out and see what it is. I mean, I gave facebook a chance. Just wait for the upcoming post on what is wrong with facebook. Feel free to use it, or just rail on me in the comments. Just remember I can replace your gravatar on my site if I want. You did go sign up for one right?

This also applies to email forwards. So don’t send me any forwards without googling to see if it is true first. Or just don’t send me forwards.

As proof that I am serious about this and non-discrimitatory, I was forced to IM Jenny a link to http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/ while writing this post. Feel free to use it yourself to help teach others how to google for themselves.

Sincerely,

-The Management

• Keep up with friends and family
• Share photos and videos
• Control privacy online
• Reconnect with old classmates

I’ve already got a blog to let everyone know what is going on and you can get one too if you want for free (Blogger). We share our photos and videos on Picasa Web Albums, which of course is free. So why would I want to use Facebook? No really, I’m asking so leave a comment and tell me why. I can do everything that you can do on Facebook without having to live in their little private sandbox where they control everything. And I like control.

Oh, the social thing you say? Well I’m not really all that social, but you may have a point. Social applications are all the rage in these days. I’ve decided to give Facebook a chance so I’ve committed to keeping up with it at least minimally for a while. It is good at finding people through your relationships such as your schools and work. In the end I think I’ll still prefer managing my presence on the web myself with my own sites and tools, but I might be able to be convinced to at least maintain a presence on Facebook. It does at least offer RSS feeds so that I can easily follow it. What’s that? You use Facebook but not an RSS reader? Well, if you want to me to give Facebook a go of it and you want to be my friend you better at least give an RSS reader a try. PS, I fully accept that most of you will only be my friend so that you can lobby me to get Jenny to join.

We weren’t sure we even heard the commercial correctly so I did some research. First the hardware. PC World said that the laptop configuration they tested cost $2949, but if you go to the online Apple store and configure the same thing it costs $3499. Turns out RAM is VERY expensive from Apple and the upgrade to 4 GB costs $700! Come on Apple, $700 for 4 GB of RAM, get real. I’ll cut PC World a break and assume they bought their RAM from someone else for $150 to get to their price. But they are still forgetting to add $220, which is the retail cost of Windows Vista that you have to pay to run it on your Mac. That makes the cost $3169. WOW, that’s one heck of a laptop and if I’m paying that much it better be fast no matter what OS I’m running.

But what is Apple trying to say? That isn’t a rhetorical question; I’m really not sure. Are they saying that Apple makes better hardware than Microsoft? That’s easy since Microsoft doesn’t sell hardware. Are they saying that Mac OS X is better, faster, easier then Vista? Well, then why would you make claims about how fast Vista is on your hardware? Are they trying to convince you to buy their hardware and run Windows on it? That doesn’t sound so bad for Microsoft since they don’t sell hardware and that would be a full retail version of Windows. I’m pretty sure their margins are pretty good on manufacturing those DVDs. I give up, I just don’t get this commercial.

I’m not done yet though. While on Apple’s website I found their list of “Thinking about upgrading to Vista? Even more reasons to get a Mac.”

1. No upgrade nightmares. Basically they say that Mac OS X runs on seven year old Mac hardware so you won’t need to upgrade your hardware. But this is supposed to be people thinking about upgrading to Vista, who I would assume would be PC users, and you can’t run Mac OS X on a PC. So that guy probably doesn’t have a seven year old Mac laying around that isn’t made into a MacQuarium. (Lisa, please can we make yours into a Macquarium for the kids.)
2. You can even run Windows. That is #2? You can buy both? So basically they are saying that it’s hard to survive in the world dominated by Windows. That doesn’t make me want to switch to Mac too badly if I still have to deal with Windows.
3. It’s simpler. No complaints here. This is actually a valid reason.
4. You don’t have to buy new stuff. They say that all your hardware (printer, camera, cellphone) will work with a Mac. True that most stuff does work these days, but this a deficiency that they have improved recently. Microsoft is still the dominant platform and has a high compatiblity rate. For example, my logitech webcam isn’t supported on Mac.
5. Know iTunes? You know Mac. Maybe if I used it I’d be more impressed.
6. Macs run Microsoft Office. A second item on the list that would generate revenue for Microsoft. And it’s Office 2004 by the way which is soon to be 4 years old. How about a nod to something like OpenOffice that is free? That’s what I recommend on Windows systems.
7. You can take it with you. I’m fuzzy on this one too since it sounds like they are saying they can do what everyone else can do, not how they are better. They talk about how Apple has adopted computing standards for things like files and they give the example of Microsoft Office files working on the Mac. Really, I didn’t know that the Office format was a standard other than being the de facto.

I’m not trying to debate which OS is technically superior here, just taking a look at the marketing campaign. So come on Apple. You’ve got so many loyal fans whom you’ve inspired (and who are probably ready to let me have it in the comments), but this is what you try to convince me with?

Oh, how nice of Compaq to thank me and tell me about how they are going to help me get set up. But wait, what do I do now? There aren’t any buttons, I press a few keys, click the mouse, hit Esc and nothing happens. Then I notice that a portion of the a button is barely visible and if I mouse over it, it highlights red so I’m pretty sure it’s a button but I have no clue what it does. All I can see is “B” and the rest of the button is off the screen and you can’t move the window over. What could that mean? Begin?

Well, without any other options I clicked the button and I was able to continue and get to Windows where I immediately started uninstalling everything, beginning with the Compaq software which was so extremely helpful. Now it wasn’t all the software’s fault (although I would still consider that poor UI design). It turns out that I had to go into the LCD’s menu and tell it to auto-adjust for it to fit the screen correctly. This took me several minutes to figure out so I can only imagine how long it takes less experienced users. I’m not letting them off the hook as easy as saying it was a minor hardware issue either. This was a complete computer purchased as a bundle. From my user perspective, the experience should have been the same as what you get with a Mac. Then again, you get what you pay for and a Mac would’ve cost a heck of a lot more. 

There were record highs the days leading up to Thanksgiving and the day before was up to 90 degrees. Unfortunatly, though, a cold front moved in for Thanksgiving and there was a 10 mph wind the entire time. We had planned on the girls coming to hang out and play for most of the day, but they were only able to stay for 20 minutes or so and drop off McDonald’s for lunch. By noon the line had filled to about 15 which was the minimum number that they had for most of the computers. Most people showed up all excited and spent 15 minutes in the wind before realizing they weren’t prepared for the night and then went walking down to Sears, which was open on Thanksgiving, and bought tents. We had a good time waiting, though, and spent most of the time just standing around talking. The father/son team, Tam and David, kept things lively. When I walked up, I thought Tam looked familiar and it turns out that we both do the same running club on Monday nights. David was about 13 and full of energy. He was excited to hear that I had brought a football. All the guys took turns playing catch with him until our fingers were frozen. It worked out pretty well to end up at that location because the Office Max next door was still under construction so we had port-a-potties available. Some people would go and make a run for food or bathrooms to the nearby McDonalds and others would go sit in their cars to warm up. I’m a purist though and held my spot continously. You might be wondering about what is acceptable. There aren’t any official line rules, so that is why I thought it was worth it to go early to be in the front and not have to worry about people’s friends coming and jumping in line later. But as in past years there really wasn’t much controversy. Someone started a list and wanted the front of the line to keep track of it, but eventually it got lost (oops). Since most people were in their tents at night it was pretty uneventful. The closest thing to a throw-down that we had was when the news vans from two local stations both showed up to broadcast live for the 10 o’clock news. Yeah, that’s right the news guys picked my location. You can check out the video, including the weather report, in our photo album. It got pretty cold for us down here and the wind had some bite to it. I ended up with some windburn on my face and my ears hurt from wearing a stocking hat for so long.

At 3 AM, Best Buy employees came out and went down the line handing out tickets for all of the big deal items. The ticket is a voucher that guarantees you that item as long as you pick it up by 9 AM. This process can be chaotic if you aren’t prepared as the employees aren’t always the best at knowing what it is, how much it is, and may even pass you by if you aren’t watching. My policy is, if you aren’t sure, take the ticket for the item because you can always give it back, but once they are handed out they are gone. This year I made a pretty good haul and got everything I wanted. I got 5 computers - 2 desktops and 3 laptops. If you were paying attention you would know that is two extra laptops. Well you see, they will let you get one ticket for each item. And they had a really good deal on Sony Vaio laptops, one which was just the laptop and the other was with a printer and case. So I got one of each. I’ll keep one and I sold the other one on eBay and made $175. And then if I sell my old laptop I’ll end up with a new laptop for free. Buying 5 computers takes time and it took them 45 minutes to ring everything up and make sure everything was correct. Then I rolled my fully loaded cart (5 computer and 4 printers) through the mob and out to the truck. By then the parking lot was a mess and traffic was horrible. I think camping out for Black Friday deals is crazy, but at least you know you are going to get good deals. However, I have no urge at all to do any shopping on Black Friday where you have to fight crowds. I made it home before the girls were up. In total, I saved 54%, close to $2000 on all of the computers combined.

Don’t miss the videos and pictures in our photo gallery.

One of the reasons I like using Google’s services is that they are always making improvements. Recently, they added IMAP support to Gmail which was the one feature I had been wanting. The IMAP protocol is more advanced and does handle the above issues. If you access your Gmail online as well as using a client like Outlook, you might want to consider switching over, but if you only access it at home it won’t make much difference. I switched over and have been very happy with it. The only thing that is a little odd is that Gmail uses tags instead of folders so IMAP has to map the Gmail tags to folders. Since Gmail lets you add two different tags to an email, it might show up in two folders in your client. You may also want to turn off your clients junk mail filter since Gmail’s filter is probably better and will have already filtered out the junk. If you are interested in learning more, go to Gmail’s IMAP help page here. Don’t forget to enable IMAP in your Gmail settings too.

So what could be better than Gmail? How about your own personal Gmail server for your domain name like @drozmonkey.com? Stay tuned…

Last year Jenny’s mom & brother were visiting, so Zach went along. When we went to get in line at 5PM we were already tenth in line. We still got everything we wanted (a computer for Jenny’s parents, one for my grandma & one for my uncle), but it was a little too close as one of the items we were getting was a limit of 10 per store (thankfully, someone ahead of us did not want a desktop). This year I’m shopping for computers for Jenny’s grandma and my parents. Most of the ads have already been leaked on the Internet and Google can easily find them for you. I’m not sure what time I’ll head out but we might be eating turkey in the parking lot.

You might think camping out overnight for these deals is crazy, but I’m willing to do it to save 65% on a PC. Heck, this year I don’t even think I’ll be getting anything for myself, but it also a fun little social experiment. You get to watch all of the people drive by at 1 AM and say that you are crazy, but what are they doing driving around a Best Buy parking lot at 1 AM? You also get to talk to all of the people who are like #300 in line and come up to the front to ask everyone if they are waiting for the item they want in the hopes that 300 people came for something other than what they did! Line jumpers and people confronting line jumpers; yet another reason it is nice to be in the front. And everyone (including myself) going back through the ad trying to fight off the the urge to add more items to their list.

So, who’s up for a Black Friday camp-out? The high is supposed to be 75 and the low 49 . . . not too bad.